Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens

Who Are We And Why Are We Here? This New Book Delivers One Hell Of An Answer

Though we may have learned how to kill in Australia, however, our numbers did not yet allow us to become more than a particularly pernicious predator. This remained the case until about 10,000 years ago when what Harari calls “history’s biggest fraud” — the agricultural revolution — swelled all ranks beyond all proportion.

Harari’s take on agriculture is one of his book’s great pleasures. Sweeping, damning and entirely counter to the simple response-to-scarcity that is customarily depicted in textbooks, Harari’s account of the agricultural age is one in which we make the most devilish of Faustian bargains. Essentially, this is where we accept the backaches, the deforming injuries, the malnutrition, the social hierarchies, the wars, and the large-scale violence of the historical period in exchange for a cheap-and-nasty population boost. This is where we begin to appear less like an animal and more like a virus. This, in the middle of this entirely secular creation story, is where we fall.

The rest, as they say, is history. Harari’s analysis of these events, from the beginnings of religion and money to the Industrial Revolution, is unique insofar as it asks us to account for the happiness delivered by these things rather than for the unity or the plenty, but it is Sapiens’ account of prehistory that gives the book its singular purpose.

Evolution is a slow process, even in the case of shortcut-taking species such as our own. For the entirety of the historical period, from Uruk to New York, we have been the same people. While we have ingeniously yoked this or that device to our ancient, savannah-bred hopes (“Nationalists believe that political self-definition is essential for our happiness [while] Communists postulate that everybody would be blissful under the dictatorship of the proletariat”…), the hopes have not changed. Like all animals we want plenty, and like no animal save us, we intend to re-order the entire planet and beyond in order to secure unfathomable amounts of it. It is this desire, and our increasing ability to fulfill it, that accounts for the book’s second essential answer: why we are here.

According to Harari, our purpose — or rather, the end of our linear progression, which in practice is inextricable from the idea of “purpose” — is to transcend ourselves. At the dawn of the 21st century, he writes, we are becoming capable of “breaking free of [our] biological limits.”

Among Harari’s proofs for this claim are things such as the dawning of artificial intelligence and the creation of genetically modified plants and animals, each of which can be said to be the products of intelligent design rather than natural selection. It is interesting that this religiously loaded term appears in this context, as this gives Harari’s creation story the aspect of many of its faithful counterparts, but with us in the divine role.

It is not customary for a creation myth to end on a note of disquiet. In the Babylonian Enuma Elish, for example, the defeat of the demon Tiamat by the city-god Marduk gives us the world itself — the sun, the moon, the stars, and the fertile earth. Though we are placed here in service to the gods, we are nonetheless here. From order comes chaos.

The Christian version of the tale is also what we might call “hesitantly optimistic”: though we supped from the Tree of Knowledge and were expelled from the garden, the incarnation of god in the form of Jesus Christ gives us the opportunity for eternal life.

Harari’s Sapiens is more despairing. After a list of science and its wonders, from the Singularity to the restoration of extinct species to immortality-through-downloaded-consciousness, the historian is left with a singular question: “Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”

It is difficult to reconcile the teetering, thirsting Sapiens of the savannah, of the Australian “conquest,” with the sort of species who might direct these world-defining powers in a fruitful manner. After all, we are no different than they were, we are only more collectively dexterous. So how would a species so expert at producing desolation deal with the ability to create worlds, to persist forever? Have we ever shown any great regard for the sort of delicate, self-perpetuating ecosystems that spawned us way back when? Or is Harari’s thesis bound to enter into history as the most modern and desultory creation-myth of them all, the one in which order breeds chaos?